Full Transcript –

Hi, this is Rod Santomassimo and welcome to the Massimo Show. The objective of the Massimo Show is to share how you can maximize your personal professional margin. That’s right. Let’s make more money in less time. Let’s turn chaos into clarity, confusion into confidence and income into real wealth. Along with sharing my insight on how I grew a multimillion dollar professional business, we’re going to bring you the expert advice from a variety of authors, consultants and thought leaders who provide the tools you need to maximize your own personal and professional margin. Welcome to the Massimo Show.

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Gary Vaynerchuk:       Well, the answer is do I build the business or do I build a personal brand? I mean that’s real. Like that becomes the question and I think the answer is clearly – you can do both if you decide to. Just giving up economics to create infrastructure around you to deliver on the personal brand part like I have.

Rod:   That was Gary Vaynerchuk, otherwise known as Gary Vee, CEO and founder of Vayner Media. If you don’t know Gary Vaynerchuk, then you are way behind the times. Gary is the Modern Day Guru in regards to marketing, in regards to brand presence, digital and overall, in regards to trading attention, which is his forte. On this very special fifth episode of the Massimo Show, I’m going to share with you some insight into my conversation with Gary Vee. Now, why is the fifth episode so special? But yes, I’m sharing some insight from Gary Vee but also number 5 happens to be my favorite number. I wear it all the time when I still play my masters lacrosse games and I wore it in college and I wore it in club, and why? Because it’s my father’s favorite number. Oh, and by the way, it’s Gary Vee’s favorite number as well. So let’s get started with this conversation with the one and only Gary Vaynerchuk.

Intro:  Hi, this is Rod Santomassimo and welcome to The Massimo Show. The objective of the Massimo Show is to share how you can maximize your personal professional margin. That’s right – let’s make more money in less time. Let’s turn chaos into clarity, confusion into confidence and income into real wealth. Along with sharing my insight and how I grew a multimillion dollar professional business, we’re going to bring you expert advice from a variety of authors, consultants, and thought leaders who provide the tools you need to maximize your own personal and professional margin. Welcome to The Massimo Show!

Rod:    So like many of our listeners, I run a business. But then again, I’m trying to build a brand – the brand of the business and the brand of myself. And in regards to where you are in your career, you have that decision to make as well. Are you building your personal brand or are you leveraging the brand of your business? They’re both vital to what direction you’re taking. And for some of you, it’s going to be one and not both depending on what your objectives are. For me, I always thought I was at a crossroads. So what did I do? I attended the 4Ds, Digital Discovery+ Deep Dive with the Vayner Media Group and with Gary Vaynerchuk himself earlier this year. And during our conversation, Gary shared with me his thoughts, on maybe what I should be thinking of in regards to building brand, whether it be my personal brand or the company brand. And then after our discussion, Gary went ahead and created a podcast based partially on our conversation. So I thought I’d share parts of that podcast with you and my actual conversation with Gary earlier this year. So up first, what do I do? Do I build my own personal brand or do I build my company brand? What’s the best avenue for me? Let me share with you what Gary thought about what I thought was a predicament, but turns out that it’s a natural question –

Gary Vaynerchuk:  Well, the answer to do I build the business or do I build a personal brand? I mean that really becomes the question and I think the answer is, clearly, that you can do both, if you decide to. Just giving up economics to create infrastructure around you to deliver on the personal brand part like I have. I mean that’s the real crossroads for you, to your point, is you can either operate the scalability of this business or you could double down on your personal brand – maximize your speaking fees, do one-off consulting things for big companies, write books. I know you can do both because I’m living it, right, but it means not, like I have not made as much money as I could over the last four years even though I know the economy’s going to collapse where it’d be nice to hoard some cash because I believe in building both.

Rod:    Does the brand continue to be me or is it focused on the reputation of the company?

Gary Vaynerchuk:   Your answer is both. The only reason you should choose is if you didn’t have the economics to pump both.

Rod:    Are they different messages, different channels?

Gary Vaynerchuk:     Sure. I mean they’re definitely not different channels. I would tell everybody here: every single channel that’s viable – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin, podcast – they’re all in play. They all are right. I told Jordan the other day, my train, I’m like, you should dominate Linkedin. The organic reach is real, but you have to make content that’s like “6 quick exercises for people that travel a hundred days a year” because that’s a Linkedin crowd. You know, “9 great exercises for a CEO.” Like you have to customize the creative for the distribution. So it’s not different channels, but they are slightly different messages. I mean Guerin will tell you that some of my opinions actually are slightly different than some of Vayner Media’s actual opinions for clients on media. That’s just real.

Rod:   So that’s always a question I’ve been asked and I thought I’d ask Gary Vee, you know, what channel should I use? Is it going to be Facebook? Is it going be Linkedin? Is it going to be Twitter? Is it going to be Instagram? And the obvious response is: it’s going to be everything because you have different audiences and therefore different messaging on different platforms. So think about yourself, what you’re offering to your marketplace, to your ideal client, to your avatar. Where are they, where are they hanging out? What’s your demographics? And that is where you really should think about and focus what you need to do to start sending your message. Now for us as a coaching and consulting company, our audience will tend to be moreso on Linkedin than perhaps Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. It does not mean we don’t deliver content on those other channels. We deliver different content, different tone, different approaches, both from myself, Rod Santomassimo, as well as from the Massimo Group. For you, you have to know where your audience is and what message you need to get out for them. So for Gary, I asked for expansion on the idea of Linkedin as far as professional audience and how we reach out to them.

Gary Vaynerchuk:  No, Linkedin is one of the places to go and you should make it more business content. But like every 25 to 55 year old dude in America lives on Instagram. And there’s plenty of women in commercial real estate and you should also get to them if you’re willing to make enough volume of content, you can do everything. If you play out my thesis, I think what you’ll see is when machine learning and automation hits scale in 15 years, every company is gonna be making 27,000 pieces of content a day, because you should. If you could afford to make a piece of content for all 330 million Americans that was tailored to them and they would see it, you would win. Like, I just want to really drill this home and I’ll tell you why it will really matter to everybody here – because everybody’s got the same answer.

Gary Vaynerchuk:    It’s why I decided to write this new book. The answer is volume of content. I have a mother, a sister and a wife, and if you knew who they were and their names, and the piece of content in a place where I was said, “Do you want to buy Tamara a gift for her birthday in May,” that may convert me. The reason nobody does that is it’s too expensive to make content and most people don’t know how to run media. So what everybody does is the complete opposite: they make one piece of content and run it on Facebook for 18 to 99 year olds and hope to see what happens. So the reason I’m drilling this home is you’re going to get every answer from that statement. Because what you’re going to get into is the AND business instead of the OR business. If you think about your framework like us over a glass of wine talking about 1971 Joe Nameth, as you’re peppering questions, I’m always going to say, AND, got it? And so now the only thing that happens is how much money do you want to spend? Can you hire the right people? The End.

Rod:   And once you get to know Gary and follow his material, which I highly recommend as I love his podcast – you’ll find when you ask a question, you’re gonna get a long answer and an extended and expanded answer in regards to what you should be doing. In this case, he talked about the volume of content. Now, I only had a brief time with Gary, therefore the short podcast today, so I’m glad I asked one final question and that’s this: What has he done that is so successful? And I preempted that by saying, look, the reason the Massimo Group, my company, is so successful is because I’ve done exactly what he suggested. I have surrounded myself and invested in great people, people that are smarter than me in every single facet of my business. Think about your business. Are you a great marketer? Are you a great salesperson? Are you a great operator? Are you a great coach? Are you a great copywriter, optimization, SEO? A website designer? Are you great at all those things? I kind of doubt that. Gosh knows I’m not. So therefore I went, I went and aligned myself with the best and brightest I could possibly do and yes, afford, but I invested the money knowing they could put out a better product than I.

Rod:     So that was the secret to my success as far as I can tell the last 10 plus years of the Massimo Group. So I asked Gary the same question. So if that’s my secret, what is your secret to your success?

Gary Vaynerchuk:   It’s interesting. I like good work environments. So I start with me. I always say to like anybody that’s very senior and we’re having a debate, I’m like, look, but I don’t like that. And if I’m unhappy, me as the engine is so much more powerful than everything else. It doesn’t matter how much she makes for us or he makes for us or what this is going to make for us. If I come in this morning not pumped, we’re finished. So 1) I put myself in a position to be mentally happy, 2) I give more than I ask. I really do. And I really do and I think about it in forever terms. Trades are funny. As long as you’re committed to giving more than you take, I’m not crippled if I feel like somebody is over delivering for their salary or they started off giving me more, I’m always fighting to give more. And I always think I’ve in perpetuity to do it. I love doing things for my employees out of left field, you know? So that’s leverage though. I create brand and impact and influence, which gives me leverage because the smartest people understand I have that. Thus they want to give so they can get, etc., so I’m obsessed with giving more. Most business owners try to extract more from their employees than they give. I really see it. It’s what they think it is. I really don’t. I really don’t. I really think of it as reverse. I really think everything’s my fault. I think that I should be giving more. I don’t think anybody should work even remotely close to as hard as me.

Rod:       So there you have it: Gary Vaynerchuck’s secret to success is really two fold. First, he always comes mentally prepared. He’s very gracious – he’s appreciative of what is available to all of us out there in the world and therefore he’s always giving, giving, giving, thinking that no, your employees don’t work for you. In fact, you work for them and I share that perspective. Actually, our greatest clients are our partners in what we do here at the Massimo Group. They’re employees, they’re contractors, they’re part-time, they’re out-sourced, they’re full-time whatever they may be, I know for a fact I’m willing to go as far as they can go. So let’s put them in position to succeed.

Rod:     And that’s it. That was my conversation with Gary Vee. Was it brief? Yes, but I got to spend a whole day with his team and learn more. And the reason I invested with that one day, and think about it, I invested one day – just me and 11 other people across the world came in to meet with him and his team. I’m picked that one day for one reason and one reason only, and that was to gain clarity. Clarity of what we were doing and was it correct . When I left there with a game plan in regards to what I need to do to continue to grow our business, grow our presence, grow my presence, and one thing, of course, is the Massimo Show, the podcast – content, content, content. So I highly suggest, I highly suggest you follow Gary Vaynerchuk or go to his podcast, AskGaryVee. Absolutely you need to follow him, listen to him, and more importantly, implement what he shares. I hope you implement what I share with you today as far as my conversation with Gary Vee and some insight to how you too can handle that crossroads of either building yourself and your brand or building your company brand. Some of you just need to do one. Others may have to do both and some of you, it will be a combination – you’ll build your brand but you’ll leverage your company brand along the way. I hope that helps and look if you like it, Gary said, give, give, give. So go ahead and give yourself and your friends an opportunity and share this podcast with them. Hey, until next time, this is Rod Santomassimo with the Massimo Show. Let’s continue to move forward.

Conclusion:   Hi, this is Rod Santomassimo, president and founder of the Massimo Group. And did you know that for over the past 11 plus years, we’ve worked with thousands of independent contractors, solopreneurs years and small business owners just like you in repositioning their and/or their team’s efforts so they can build the personal professional practice they’ve always dreamed of. We provide coaching programs for all levels of experience, earnings and yes, success. So if you’re finally ready to get off that transaction treadmill and tracing deals that are growing nowhere and start building the personal professional business and life consisting of greater wealth and more time, well, check us out at massimo.coach